People over 50 have different health concerns than their younger counterparts. As your body begins to age, your organs and immune system can become more susceptible to chronic diseases such as high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, arthritis, and high cholesterol. That’s why it’s more important for you to exercise, get enough sleep, manage your stress levels, and keep a healthy diet.
Incorporating fermented foods such as sourdough bread can help protect your body against age-related diseases. A slice of sourdough bread has 100 calories with 3 grams of protein and just 1 gram of fat. Sourdough bread doesn’t have much added sugar but has a gram of fiber to help manage your blood sugar. You shouldn’t eat sourdough bread at every meal because a slice has 220 milligrams of sodium, which is 9% of your daily value.
Although sourdough bread doesn’t have a ton of vitamins and minerals aside from B vitamins, the fermentation process improves the nutrients in whole grains to provide phenolic compounds and ACE-inhibitory peptides. These compounds have antioxidant, anti-hypertensive, and anti-diabetic powers that can sustain your health as you age, according to a 2019 review in Nutrients.
Sourdough’s low glycemic index can reduce your risk of disease
Sourdough bread is a component of the Mediterranean diet, which can lower your risk of heart disease, diabetes, and cancer, according to a 2019 editorial in Aging Clinical and Experimental Research. Sourdough bread has a lower glycemic index (GI) because the fermentation process produces acids that slow down digestion. The low-GI sourdough can help people trying to manage age-related conditions associated with blood sugar, such as type 2 diabetes and obesity.
The glycemic index of foods can also influence your risk of heart disease. Foods high in glycemic load are associated with low HDL cholesterol and high triglycerides because they cause spikes in your blood sugar that can lead to insulin resistance, which is a risk factor for heart disease. Replacing your high-GI foods with lower-GI foods like sourdough bread can support your heart health by reducing oxidative stress and inflammation. High GI foods increase your insulin levels, which promote cancer growth.
Other benefits of sourdough bread
If you’ve ever made homemade bread, you’ll need that little packet of yeast to leaven the dough. Sourdough bread is naturally leavened by allowing a mixture of flour and water to ferment for several days. These little microbes in the sourdough starter break down some of the gluten in the bread. Although people with celiac disease or gluten allergies can’t have sourdough bread, people with sensitive digestive systems might find sourdough bread a little more digestion-friendly. This includes people who have problems eating fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides, and polyols (FODMAPs).
You might assume that sourdough bread is a great source of probiotics because it’s a fermented food. Even though the bacteria in the sourdough starter are alive during the leavening process, these microbes die when the bread is baked. However, the fermentation process reduces phytates, which are naturally occurring substances in plant foods that prevent your body from absorbing key minerals. Fermentation of sourdough also lowers cancer-linked acrylamide by lowering the acidity of the bread, according to a 2023 review in Frontiers in Nutrition.